OpenAI's Sam Altman launches Worldcoin crypto project

Worldcoin is a cryptocurrency founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. It was launched on Monday.

World ID is the core product of this project. It is described by the company as a "digital passport" that proves its owner is not an AI bot but a human. Worldcoin’s ‘orb’, a silver, bowling-ball-sized ball, is used to scan the iris of customers in person. The World ID is created once the orb scans the iris to verify that the person in front of it is real.

Tools for Humanity, a San Francisco-based company with a Berlin office, is the company behind Worldcoin.

Worldcoin has 2,000,000 users since its beta phase, and now with the launch on Monday, it is expanding 'orbing operations' to 35 cities across 20 countries. Signing up in some countries will earn you Worldcoin's WLD cryptocurrency token.

WLD's value rose during early Monday trading. Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world. It reached a high of $5.29 at a price of $0.15 and by 1000 GMT, was at $2.49, after a trading volume of $25.1 million.

Alex Blania, co-founder of Reuters, said that blockchains could be used to store World IDs while maintaining privacy. They also couldn't easily be shut down or controlled by a single entity.

World IDs, according to the project, will be needed in an age of chatbots that generate a human-like language. World IDs can be used to distinguish between AI bots and real people online.

Altman told Reuters Worldcoin can also help with how the economy is reshaped by generative AI.

He said that AI will supercharge people, and this will have massive economic consequences.

Altman likes the universal basic income (UBI), a program of social benefits that is usually run by government and where everyone is entitled to payments. Altman thinks UBI will help combat income inequality because AI "will do more work than people do now." World IDs can only be issued to real people, so they could reduce fraud in UBI.

Altman believes that a world of UBI is'very distant in the future.' He does not know what entity would distribute money but Worldcoin sets up the groundwork to make it a reality.

He said, 'We need to experiment with different things to figure out what we should do.